Sure, jobs is not an ideological issue. But how you use governmental influence to create/encourage job growth is DEFINITELY an ideological issue. And Republicans have been blocked by their ideology, which consists solely of slobbering on the knobs of the wealthy (“trickle down,” “job creators”) since the Reagan Administration. What’s more, the moneyed elite who run the Republican Party are very happy with the current recovery … sure, it’s jobless, but the stock market is going great guns, which is all that matters in their eyes.
And now that Wall Street has bought out the Democrats, they are not going to make any bold moves on the economy, especially if they threaten to raise taxes on the wealthy or corporations – they’ll just stitch up the social safety net, or at least try to retain it, as best they can. Which puts the Democrats way ahead of the Republicans as far as regular folk are concerned.
Right. Imagine if Romney actually ran on his strengths. As soon as he got the nomination, he could have said that America needs and wants immigrants because its both a moral and economical thing to do. That enforcement is already happening and that he’d support the DREAM Act or a variant. Pretend that Romney, from the beginning, touted his Massachusetts health care plan as a the building block of Obamacare, and instead of running from it, told the nation the truth: that millions more were going to get on health care, millions more didn’t have to worry about pre-existing conditions, and that its stupid that the rest of the civilized world can have a working health care system that’s government run but the US cannot. And to tell his right wing extremist base to knock off the moronic badmouthing of actually helping sick and dying people. That would have been a lot different of an election
Obama was, and the economy was getting better. And the voters knew that the years of GOP obstructionism on jobs was the fault of conservatives and not Obama
This. Obama is destroying our country; Obama is going to stage a coup d’etat; Obama deliberately killed the ambassador to Libya; etc. A RW friend of mine insists that he is “enslaved.” Another insists that the Climate Change issue is a massive hoax by pseudo-scientists who are out to destroy capitalism.
The virulence and sheer loudness of the rhetoric is absurd. They are alienating anyone who is capable of moderate thinking.
All it takes is for the Democrats to go too far and act like jerks or too arrogant and the voters will vote in a Republican for president. Perhaps he/she won’t get reelected, but it doesn’t take a lot for the voting public to want a change in parties. Heck, the Democrats don’t even have to do anything wrong other than be on top for too long before things shift towards the Republicans even if the party is acting like an ass. Then again, if too many of its members act like public jerks and very offensive, especially toward women, that may upend conventional wisdom and keep the Pubs from retaking office for a good long time.
The party naturally evolves on social issues. It will always be the more rightward party on such things, but the REpublican party today is more liberal on all social issues except abortion than the Democratic party was in 1990.
A similar dynamic is occurring on economic issues, with both parties moving to the right. Liberty always wins in the end.
Gay rights, for starters. In 1990 Republicans opposed legal protections for gays entirely, while Democrats merely opposed gay marriage or gays in the military. Now the Republicans occupy the Democrats’ old ground.
See, this is what I meant about the GOP and social issues. They are incapable of talking about them in the present tense. You do know that a kid born in the “recent” year of 1990 has now voted in two presidential elections? You think in another few years when they vote for their third president they’re suddenly going to decide that they were wrong and those gays should be kicked out of the military? That ship sailed and the Republicans need to catch up.
But I was really focusing on the way the GOP has moved all the way back to the 1800’s on women’s issues. Just last week the Mississippi governor said that he feels the problem with education in America is working mothers. A couple days before that a Republican congresswoman from Tennessee was arguing against a new Paycheck Fairness Act event though on average women earn $0.77 to every $1 earned by a male coworker. Their blanket anti-abortion stance hurts them badly, we saw it in the Congressional elections. We can still see the fallout with Komen. It’s so bad that the former president of the Virginia Federation of Republican Women, Jan Schar, has endorsed the Democratic candidate for governor because of the current Republican hostility towards women’s health and well being. Women make up just over 50% of the population. Attempting to win by attacking them is just insane. The 19th Amendment was passed in 1920. Women are going to be voting. Ironically, you know who Susan B. Anthony voted for in 1872 that lead to her arrest? She cast her ballot and, I quote, “Positively voted the Republican ticket - straight.”
And being socially conservative has not always been the Republican platform. The Progressive Republicans and Rockefeller Republicans were socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The Progressive Republicans even gave us Teddy Roosevelt, one of the best presidents we’ve ever had. He’d never make it past the primaries today thanks to the RINO police. A Republican who died almost one hundred years ago should not be more modern in view than the current GOP.
You’re mistaking liberal 100 years ago for liberal today. Teddy was not exactly pro-choice or pro-gay rights, or pro-immigration, or anti-segregation. But since he wanted to stick it to the rich, that’s “progressive” enough for most modern liberals.
Abortion is not a winning issue for either party given the continued split among Americans on the issue. And unlike with other social issues, it’s not shifting towards more permissiveness like most issues. Opinions on abortion have been stable for 40 years.
As for womens’ rights, the gap isn’t so much between women and men, so much as married women and single women. The decline of marriage is hurting Republicans more than any particular stance on womens’ issues, thus the GOP desire to promote marriage. Marriage= Republicans.
While most of us support liberty, there’s nothing wrong with decrying the negative social effects the misuse of liberty can create. Liberals have tried to deny the negative effect on children of the decline of marriage, but the science is ironclad: kids thrive best with a mother and a father. Of course, to point this out makes Republicans troglodytes. And Democrats anti-science.
Because the Republicans occupy the rightward most mainstream position on social issues. We do live in a democracy, so people who do not agree with the left on social issues deserve representation.
That being said, the Democratic Party has long tolerated social conservatism in the party just so long as it comes with progressive views on economic issues. Robert Byrd wasn’t 23 years behind his party, he was consistently more like 40, but was hailed as a progressive hero.
But that’s ignoring the question I asked. If the Democrats usually end up being right on social issues and the Republicans eventually end up agreeing with them, why concede the lead to the Democrats? Why not get out in front of the Democrats on social issues?
Unfortunately two possible answers present themselves. One is that the Republicans are better at spotting patterns. Time and again, the Democrats advocate for some social issue and the Republicans oppose them. And twenty years later, the Republicans end up agreeing with the position the Democrats had held. But somehow the Republicans don’t figure out that this is evidence that they’re usually wrong on social issues and the Democrats are usually right.
And that’s the more credible possibility. The other one is the cynical one. The Republicans know the Democrats are generally right on social issues and they’re eventually going to end up adopting the same position. But that’s twenty years in the future. They’ll get votes now for opposing that Democratic position so they oppose it even though they know it’s right.
When did the Republican party give up on the idea of leadership?
Republicans do lead on economic freedom issues. And not all social issues move to the left. Abortion opinions have remained stable, and support for assisted suicide has actually dropped. That last one is a funny one, because progressives have historically always been on the wrong side of those types of issues(eugenics, euthanasia, assisted sucide) You’d think that would be a good one for Democrats to get out in front of Republicans on, but for 100 years they haven’t.
Republicans stay to the right of Democrats on social issues because they don’t know in advance which way the wind is going to blow. They’ve been wrong more often than right, but past performance doesn’t always predict future performance.
I tend to be a libertarian, so my own preference would be for Democrats and Republicans to converge on social issues so as to make the difference between the parties on economic freedom the main issue.
That seems odd to me. I think it’s more like they stay to the right because they know they have a reliable voting base of single-issue voters that they can regularly harvest by paying lip service to right wing ideology. Take abortion. There are legions of voters who vote solely on this issue. If they’re voting for drain commissioner, they want to know the candidates’ stands on abortion. Ditto for gay marriage as well as gun “rights”. While Venn diagrams of these votes will be nearly completely overlapping, they stay to the right on these issues because that’s where their votes come from. Move an inch to the left and they can’t win a primary.
This is precisely the reason the Founders rejected “democracy”, which they equated with mob rule – it lends itself to cliques voting to control everyone else’s private affairs.
There’s that too, but they do move left as society moves left, as do the Democrats. Wherever the median voter sits, Democrats will generally get to the left and Republicans to the right.